Collaborating to describe Palestine’s struggle

Pizza Before We Die: An Eyewitness Account in Gaza
by Hassan Kanafani, with Yasuko Thanh

Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2026
$19.95 / 9781834050324

Reviewed by Larry Hannant

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In November 2025, two years after Israel began an all-out military attack on Gaza that was widely condemned as genocidal, former Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari admitted defeat in the court of world public (although not elite) opinion. The Zionist state had “lost the war on social media,” he conceded. In particular, young people, “the TikTok generation,” viewed it with disgust.

Pizza Before We Die is a small but compelling example of how social media has worked to present the reality of Israel’s systemic brutality against Palestinians in Gaza, which has contributed hugely to stigmatizing Israel. Significantly, it hinges on a link between Gaza and British Columbia that constructed a book based on brief Reddit posts and won a publishing contract, all in less than a month.

Pro-Palestinian activists Yasuko Thanh and Bobby Arbess met by chance at a Canada Day rally on the grounds of the B.C. Legislature in 2025. Arbess was gathering signatures on a petition calling on Canada to impose a two-way arms embargo on Israel. He’d been reading Reddit posts from Hassan Kanafani, an engineer near Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza.

“You’re a writer?” exclaimed Arbess on hearing Thanh mention her profession. He was looking for some way to promote Kanafani’s posts to a wider audience and help Kanafani support his family, sheltering in a flimsy tent from the deluge of Israeli drones.

Thanh, a prize-winning novelist and memoirist, admitted that media technology wasn’t her strength, but agreed to look at the narrative that had been assembled to that point by other sympathetic activists. She also connected online with Kanafani and swiftly established a bond. (He was writing under a pseudonym because of the systematic Israeli assassination campaign against Palestinian journalists and writers. At least 234 of them have been targeted in Gaza alone since October 2023.)

Thanh took on a comprehensive re-editing of Kanafani’s posts to better present the powerful day-to-day accounts he had written in the midst of unrelenting misery. She opted to focus on the period from December 2024 to July 2025, which included a two-month limited pause in bombing that Kanafani describes as a “ceasefire without hope,” and that Israel soon broke.

Three weeks after first meeting Arbess, Thanh had completed the revisions. A friend offered to approach Brian Lam, publisher of Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver. Within two days, Lam had accepted it for publication. “That’s the speed of solidarity,” Thanh writes in the foreword.

Pizza Before We Die is unsparingly blunt. In a chapter titled “The Language of Ash,” Kanafani cautions: “As you read these lines, don’t get lost in the glow of the words. … This was written by a man scorched by the fire of war, worn down by trial after trial. These sentences aren’t crafted for beauty – they’re pulled from exhaustion, from pain, from the weight of days that never seem to end.”

Inevitably, in an enclave surrounded, battered, and starved by Israel, food – or, rather, the lack of it – is a major preoccupation. It’s more than just the constant search for non-existent supplies, the crippling cost of what poor offerings there are, the lack of any fuel to cook what might be found. Gas unaffordable, he and his family turn to burning cardboard, plastic, even old shoes to generate a flame for warmth and cooking.

Then there’s the indignity imposed by systemic privation. Kanafani describes a man waiting in a queue for flour who learns his brother’s house has just been struck and the family killed. Desperate to feed his own family, the man waits, intent on claiming a bag of flour and at the same time mourning his brother, alone and silent.

Thanks in part to social media, but also through more traditional communication, the ordeal of Palestinians in Gaza has reached a world audience, contributing to the worldwide revulsion at Israel’s genocide. One of the best of the accounts is the 22 short films collected into the 2025 Academy Award-nominated From Ground Zero. In it, Rashid Masharawi brought together contributions from both new and established filmmakers on the ground in Gaza, all producing their work under the harrowing conditions of the Israeli onslaught. Curator Masharawi emphasized that “we were trying to search for hope,” and the short pieces take up the challenge with considerable success, inserting humour and tenderness into a situation that beggars belief.

Kanafani struggles to hit that high note. Given his circumstances, it’s little wonder that anguish is knotted tightly through the text. Still, he recounts uplifting moments, like the famished girl who steals three raisins from a vendor, then collapses when accosted. Expecting punishment, she’s delighted to be invited to share two cans of tuna with the seller. “She eats, swinging her legs from a chair, her face lit with a joy so great it could fill the entire city.”

It’s a testament to Kanafani’s courage that he persisted in continuing to chronicle the calamity. Pizza Before We Die is an anguished cry against the criminals. Israel, of course, but Kanafani also condemns the U.S. for funneling the weaponry that sustains Israeli terror, the family dictatorships in the neighbouring Arab states that collaborate with Israel, the world governments that repeat the lie that by bombing kids in tents Israel is just defending itself.

In 2025, Egyptian-Canadian-American novelist Omar Al Akkad crafted one of the finest indictments of the Western elite’s hypocrisy about genocide in Gaza in the title of his first work of non-fiction – One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

The statement that he wrote on an earlier X post tells the full story: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

When that day of contrition arrives, the world might also acknowledge not just the brutal illegality of Israel’s holocaust in Gaza (and across Palestine) but also the sublime dignity and perseverance of the Palestinian people in the face of a holocaust. Pizza Before We Die is a testament to that spirit of sumud, steadfastness.

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Larry Hannant is the author of All My Politics Are Poetry (Victoria: Yalla Press, 2019, reviewed here by Natalie Lang). His most recent book is an edited collection titled Bucking Conservatism: Alternative Stories of Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s (Athabasca University Press, 2021). Hannant taught aspects of human rights history for years at BC universities and colleges and is engaged in writing an anti-imperialist history of human rights. He lives in Victoria. [Editor’s note: Larry Hannant has reviewed books by Maya Wind, Christopher Thomson, Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson, David Spaner, Pitman Potter, and Suchetana Chattopadhyay for The British Columbia Review, and has contributed three essays, ChatGPT and me, I’m not your man: Norman Bethune & women, and Letter from Victoria.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster